Historical and Geographical Dimensions of India’s Interaction with Southeast Asia
India-ASEAN Partnership—an Arc of Advantage
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Irrigation S E Asian Agri-history 2005, Irrigation S E Asian Agri-history 2005, Hist. Geog Dimensions India’s Interaction S E Asia, Hist. Geog Dimensions India’s Interaction S E Asia
| India-ASEAN Partnership—an Arc of Advantage The agreement, “ASEAN–India Partnership for Peace, Progress and Shared Prosperity signed at the rd India-ASEAN Summit in November 2004, bears testimony to India’s vision and the principle of reciprocity. India’s keen interest in the establishment of various regional initiatives, as Prof Man Mohini Kaul asserted, has marked the beginning of anew era of political and economic cooperation and an interesting break from India’s previous outlook where the sub-region was almost completely ignored and very little effort was made to either develop a regional approach or build linkages with neighbouring countries (Kaul 2006). India’s initiatives served as an important tool for India to associate itself with the process of implementing the Initiative for ASEAN Integration (IAI) with respect to the CLMV (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam) countries and thereby deepening its association with ASEAN (Nguyen De Nien 2002). India about the same time finds a perplexing situation of competition from other sub- regional cooperation initiatives, such as the Greater Mekong Sub region (GMS) (1992) and Lower Mekong Initiative (LMI) (2009), besides the stigma of snail-pace growth, stale performance of its trans-regional initiatives, lagging behind China and Japan in pan-Asian initiatives, lack of strategic vision and a host of domestic political compulsions (Kuppuswamy 2010). It is in this context that India needs to think strategically about long-term avenues for boosting cooperation beyond BIMSTEC and MGC, particularly in the matters relating to climate change-induced consequences, sea piracy and disaster relief, and security to the sea lanes of communication, to the extent of enhancing inter-operability between navies in the region. India also needs to adopt an action-oriented and inclusive approach rather a regionalism-oriented- 15 multilateralism in furtherance of its overarching concept of extended neighbourhood. Further, ASEAN–India Partnership also portrays an emerging Asian Community of nations which, as envisioned by the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, would constitute an arc of advantages India’s accession to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) of ASEAN, New Delhi’s endorsement of the Southeast Asia Nuclear Free Zone and its founder-membership of East Asia Summit, which is looked upon as a prelude to the much epitomized Asian Community, have augured well for broadening and deepening India-ASEAN partnership. At the Commemorative Summit held in New Delhi on 20-21 December 2012 on the eve of twenty years of dialogue partnership and ten years of summit partnership, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s pertinent reference to “connectivity—physical, institutional, people-to- people, digital and by sea and air- as holding the key to closer partnership between India and ASEAN” (PMO 2012), invariably points out the rider to the sum total of historical, geographical and economic parameters in realizing not merely the ‘ASEAN Community by 2015 but also the Asian Economic Community (as being enunciated by Japan) or Asia-Pacific Community (as being advocated by Australia, the theatre of which is Indo-Pacific, encompassing the region from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. Download 389.05 Kb. Share with your friends:
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